To try and understand life, you have to understand the opposite of life, which is death. However, death to Buddhists is the decay of the physical matter, not the soul as it is in a state of rebirth until true happiness is found. It is not that death is hard to understand, but it is that modern civilisation tries to ignore the concept of death. For many people today, death is the mere absence of life; it is blankness, it is the void. Life is identified with all that is good: with being, rationality and light, while death is perceived as evil and nothingness. But death is more than the absence of life; death together with active life is necessary for life to exist in the first place. Cycles of life and death can be likened to the alternating periods of sleep and wakefulness. Just as sleep prepares us for the next day, death can be seen as a state of rest and replenishes ourselves for our next life. In this light, death should be acknowledged as a blessing, as we perceive life as a blessing. the purpose of life to Buddhists is to find the cause of suffering and to eliminate the suffering, for most human's death is one of the most terrifying concepts in the world, as it is the unknown and we somewhat fear the unknown, however it is something that we cannot stop from occuring, it is inevitable. To overcome the fear you have to accept that everything is changing around us and is in a perpetual flux, by accepting these changes you will no longer feel the fear of life or death that causes this suffering because you will be eliminating the attachment/desire to processes that are simply out of your control, this is one of the first steps towards finding the true meaning of life.
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exploring the meaning of life
Non-FictionToday I was asked by someone ''what is the meaning of life?''. For a second, i paused, i was contemplating whether to reply a simple answer but realised that life is such a vast subject that it cannot be put into a 'simple answer' otherwise we would...
